Secondary Source
Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism
Mary Chapman. Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Era: Suffrage Era | Media: Book-Academic
Google Books has significant excerpts of this book, which won the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Triennial Book Award in 2015; the Canadian Association of American Studies Book Award of 2015; and was a finalist for the 2014 Modernist Association Book Prize.
An abstract:
For most people, the U.S. suffrage campaign is encapsulated by images of iconic nineteenth-century orators like the tightly coifed Susan B. Anthony or the wimpled Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, as Mary Chapman shows, the campaign to secure the vote for U.S. women was also a modern and print-cultural phenomenon, waged with humor, creativity, and style.
Making Noise, Making News also understands modern suffragist print culture as a demonstrable link between the Progressive Era’s political campaign for a voice in the public sphere and Modernism’s aesthetic efforts to re-imagine literary voice. Chapman charts a relationship between modern suffragist print cultural “noise” and what literary modernists understood by “making it new,” asserting that the experimental tactics of U.S. suffrage print culture contributed to, and even anticipated, the formal innovations of U.S. literary modernism. Drawing on little-known archives and featuring over twenty illustrations, Making Noise, Making News provides startling documentation of Marianne Moore’s closeted career as a suffrage propagandist, the persuasive effects of Alice Duer Miller’s popular poetry column, Asian-American author Sui Sin Far’s challenge to the racism and classism of modern suffragism, and Gertrude Stein’s mid-century acknowledgement of intersections between suffrage discourse and literary modernism.
Project Muse has made available abstracts of reviews published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2015, pp. 325-327 by Lisa Cochran Higgins; by Janice Schroeder in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 40, Issue 2-3, June/September 2014, pp. 226-229; and by Catherine Keyser in the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2015, pp. 85-89. Wiley Online Library includes links to access to two others, one by Charlie Jeffries in History: the journal of the Historical Association, Vol. 101, Issue 344, January 2016, pp. 168-170; and one by Alison Schulz in the Journal of American Culture, Vol. 39, Issue 3, September 2016, p. 373.
